The project’s overall objective is to develop a virtual environment equipped with FAIR multidisciplinary data and services to support marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders in restoring healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters. The AquaINFRA virtual environment will enable target stakeholders to store, share, access, analyze and process research data and other digital research objects from their own discipline, across research infrastructures, disciplines and national borders, using the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and the other existing operational data spaces. In addition to supporting the ongoing development of EOSC as an overarching research infrastructure, AquaINFRA addresses the specific need to enable researchers from the marine and freshwater communities to work and collaborate across these two domains. A specific objective is to develop an EOSC-based research infrastructure linking the marine and freshwater domains. This will include the development of a cross-domain and cross-country search and discovery mechanism, as well as the development of spatio-temporal analysis and modeling services through virtual research environments. A set of strategic use cases, including a pan-European use case as well as more focused use cases in the Baltic and the North Seas will provide the framework for co-design and testing of services in the targeted research communities. The project outcomes are expected to contribute to the utilization of EOSC as an overarching research infrastructure enabling collaboration between marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders working to restore healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters.

52°North leads Task 4.1, which takes care of developing the AquaINFRA Interaction Platform (AIP) as the project’s central gateway and the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) and its integrated workflow canvas. In addition, 52°North contributes to the user requirements analysis, the co-design of the AquaINFRA system architecture and the creation of the interoperability framework (Task 3.1). Our team also supports the integration of project results into the European Open Science Cloud (Task 2.2) and engages in dissemination activities (WP7).